Have you ever wanted to know exactly what renters look for when they visit sites like Rentals.com to find their next rental? The Rentals.com Product Development team recently worked with an independent consulting firm to conduct a usability study. We invited REAL prospective renters into a lab to provide their unguided feedback on a number of competitive rental home web sites.
We gained some new product feature ideas that you will see over the next several weeks. In addition, we gathered actionable feedback for property managers and owners to help their listings look more appealing to prospective renters.
Here are the top five things that you can do to improve the chances that a renter will view and respond to your property listing:
1. Always display a good number of high-quality photos of your property – renters completely ignored listings with no photos or bad photos. Also note that you need a good mix of internal and external photos.
2. Always include neighborhood information for your property – renters look for specific neighborhoods, especially to narrow a long list of search results. If a renter finds your listing after entering “Little Five Points” into a keyword search to narrow down a list of search results for Atlanta, GA she will be more likely to send a lead.
3. Always include school information for your property – the parents in our lab expected to see information about the local school district directly in the property listing and if they did not find it they would move on to the next listing.
4. List every possible amenity your property has to offer - Every renter in our lab went immediately to the amenities section of each web site to design their perfect rental home search. Property managers and owners who neglect to enter this information for their properties eliminate themselves from detailed search es.
5. Map your property - location, location, location…prospective renters cannot do much without a location. The most common use for maps that we observed in our lab was to calculate the proximity from work or school to a property. If you have reservations about listing the full address of your property, find a nearby spot and map it instead.
Log into your Rentals.com account and use these five helpful tips to update your rental property ad today!